She paused to look round the cabin, to make sure that they were alone.

"How strange he is!" she said to both her hearers, in confidence, looking from one to the other with a quick, bird-like turn of the head and bright eyes. "I have never seen any one like him."

"No?" said Dormer Colville, encouragingly.

"He said he was an Englishman; but, of course, he is not. He is, French, and has not the manner of a bourgeoie or a sailor. He has the manner of an aristocrat—one would say a Royalist—like Albert de Chantonnay, only a thousand times better."

"Yes," said Colville, glancing at Monsieur de Gemosac.

"More interesting, and so quick and amusing. He spoke of a heritage in France, and yet he said he was an Englishman. I hope he will secure his heritage."

"Yes," murmured Colville, still looking at Monsieur de Gemosac.

"And then, when we were in the boat," continued Juliette, still in confidence to them both, "he changed quite suddenly. He was short and sharp. He ordered us to do this and that; and one did it, somehow, without question. Even Marie obeyed him without hesitating, although she was half mad with fear. We were in danger. I knew that. Any one must have known it. And yet I was not afraid; I wonder why? And he—he laughed—that was all. Mon Dieu! he was brave. I never knew that any one could be so brave!"

She broke off suddenly, with her finger to her lips; for some one had opened the cabin door. Captain Clubbe came in, filling the whole cabin with his bulk, and on his heels followed Loo Barebone, his face and hair still wet and dripping.

"Mademoiselle was wondering," said Dormer Colville, who, it seemed, was quick to step into that silence which the object of a conversation is apt to cause—"Mademoiselle was wondering how it was that you escaped shipwreck in the storm."

"Ah! because one has a star. Even a poor sailor may have a star, mademoiselle. As well as the Prince Napoleon, who boasts that he has one of the first magnitude, I understand."

"You are not a poor sailor, monsieur," said Juliette.

"Then who am I?" he asked, with a gay laugh, spreading out his hands and standing before them, beneath the swinging lamp.

The Marquis de Gemosac raised himself on one elbow.

"I will tell you who you are," he said, in a low, quick voice, pointing one hand at Loo. "I will tell you." And his voice rose.

"You are the grandson of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. You are the Last Hope of the French. That is your heritage. Juliette! this is the King of France!"

Juliette turned and looked at him, with all the colour gone from her face. Then, instinctively, she dropped on one knee, and before he had understood, or could stop her, had raised his hand to her lips.



CHAPTER XV

THE TURN OF THE TIDE

"Tide's a-turning, sir," said a voice at the open doorway of the cabin, and Captain Clubbe turned his impassive face toward Dormer Colville, who looked oddly white beneath the light of the lamp.

Barebone had unceremoniously dragged his hand away from the hold of Juliette's fingers. He made a step back and then turned toward the door at the sound of his shipmate's well-known voice. He stood staring out into the darkness like one who is walking in his sleep. No one spoke, and through the open doorways no sound came to them but the song of the wind through the rigging.

At last Barebone turned, and there was no sign of fear or misgiving in his face. He looked at Clubbe, and at no one else, as if the Captain and he were alone in the cabin where they had passed so many years together in fair weather, to bring out that which is evil in a man, and foul, to evolve the good.

"What do you say?" he asked, in English, and he must have known that Captain Clubbe understood French better than he was ready to admit.

Clubbe passed his hand slowly across his cheek and chin, not in order to gain time, or because he had not an answer ready, but because he came of a slow-speaking race. His answer had been made ready weeks before while he sat on the weather-beaten seat set against the wall of "The Black Sailor" at Farlingford.

"Tide's turned," he answered, simply. "You'd better get your oilskins on again and go."

"Yes," said Loo, with a queer laugh. "I fancy I shall want my oilskins."

The boat which had been sent from Royan, at the order of the pilot, who went ashore there, had followed "The Last Hope" up the river, and was now lying under the English ship's stern awaiting her two passengers and the turn of the tide.

Dormer Colville glanced at the cabin clock.

"Then," he said, briskly, "let us be going. It will be late enough as it is before we reach my cousin's house."

He turned and translated his remark for the benefit of the Marquis and Juliette, remembering that they must needs fail to understand a colloquy in the muttered and clipped English of the east coast. He was nervously anxious, it would appear, to tide over a difficult moment; to give Loo Barebone breathing space, and yet to avoid unnecessary question and answer. He had not lived forty adventurous years in the world without learning that it is the word too much which wrecks the majority of human schemes.

Their preparations had been made beforehand in readiness for the return of the tide, without the help of which the voyage back to Royan against a contrary wind must necessarily be long and wearisome.

There was nothing to wait for. Captain Clubbe was not the man to prolong a farewell or waste his words in wishes for the future, knowing how vain such must always be. Loo was dazed still by the crash of the storm and the tension of the effort to bring his boat safely through it.

The rest had not fully penetrated to his inmost mind yet. There had been only time to act, and none to think, and when the necessity to act was past, when he found himself crouching down under the weather gunwale of the French fishing-boat without even the necessity of laying hand on sheet or tiller, when, at last, he had time to think, he found that the ability to do so was no longer his. For Fortune, when she lifts up or casts down, usually numbs the understanding at the first turn of her wheel, sending her victim staggering on his way a mere machine, astonishingly alive to the necessity of the immediate moment, careful of the next step, but capable of looking neither forward nor backward with an understanding eye.

The waning moon came up at last, behind a distant line of trees on the Charente side, lighting up with a silver lining the towering clouds of the storm, which was still travelling eastward, leaving in its wake battered vines and ruined crops, searing the face of the land as with a hot iron. Loo lifted his head and looked round him. The owner of the boat was at the tiller, while his assistant sat amidships, his elbows on his knees, looking ahead with dreamy eyes. Close to Barebone, crouching from the wind which blew cold from the Atlantic, was Dormer Colville, affably silent. If Loo turned to glance at him he looked away, but when his back was turned Loo was conscious of watching eyes, full of sympathy, almost uncomfortably quick to perceive the inward working of another's mind, and suit his own thereto.

Thus the boat plunged out toward the sea and the flickering lights that mark the channel, tacking right across to that spit of land lying between the Gironde and the broad Atlantic, where grows a wine without match in all the world. Thus Loo Barebone turned his back on the ship which had been his home so long and set out into a new world; a new and unknown life, with the Marquis de Gemosac's ringing words buzzing in his brain yet; with the warm touch of Juliette's lips burning still upon his hand.

"You are the grandson of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette! You are the Last Hope of France!"

And he remembered the lights and shadows on Juliette's hair as he looked down upon her bent head.

Colville was talking to the "patron" now. He knew the coast, it seemed, and, somewhere or other, had learnt enough of such matters of local seafaring interest as to set the fisherman at his ease and make him talk.

They were arranging where to land, and Colville was describing the exact whereabouts of a little jetty used for bathing purposes, which ran out from the sandy shore, quite near to Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence's house, in the pine-trees, two miles south of Royan. It was no easy matter to find this spot by the dim light of a waning moon, and, half-mechanically, Loo joined in the search, and presently, when the jetty was reached, helped to make fast in a choppy sea.

They left the luggage on the jetty and walked across the silent sand side by side.

"There," said Colville, pointing forward. "It is through that opening in the pine-trees. A matter of five minutes and we shall be at my cousin's house."

"It is very kind of Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence," answered Barebone, "to—well, to take me up. I suppose that is the best way to look at it."

Colville laughed quietly.

"Yes—put it thus, if you like," he said. They walked on in silence for a few yards, and then Dormer Colville slipped his hand within his companion's arm, as was the fashion among men even in England in those more expansive days.

"I think I know how you feel," he said, suiting his step to Barebone's. "You must feel like a man who is set down to a table to play a game of which he knows nothing, and on taking up his cards finds that he holds a hand all courtcards and trumps—and he doesn't know how to play them."

Barebone made no answer. He had yet to unlearn Captain Clubbe's unconscious teaching that a man's feelings are his own concern and no other has any interest or right to share in them, except one woman, and even she must guess the larger half.

"But as the game progresses," went on Colville, reassuringly, "you will find out how it is played. You will even find that you are a skilled player, and then the gambler's spirit will fire your blood and arouse your energies. You will discover what a damned good game it is. The great game—Barebone—the great game! And France is the country to play it in."

He stamped his foot on the soil of France as he spoke.

"The moment I saw you I knew that you would do. No man better fitted to play the game than yourself; for you have wit and quickness," went on this friend and mentor, with a little pressure on his companion's arm. "But—you will have to put your back into it, you know."

"What do you mean?"

"Well—I noticed at Farlingford a certain reluctance to begin. It is in the blood, I suppose. There is, you know, in the Bourbon blood a certain strain of—well, let us say of reluctance to begin. Others call it by a different name. One is not a Bourbon for nothing, I suppose. And everything—even if it be a vice—that serves to emphasise identity is to be cultivated. But, as I say, you will have to put your back into it later on. At present there will be less to do. You will have to play close and hold your hand, and follow any lead that is given you by de Gemosac, or by my humble self. You will find that easy enough, I know. For you have all a Frenchman's quickness to understand. And I suppose—to put it plainly as between men of the world—now that you have had time to think it over—you are not afraid, Barebone?"

"Oh no!" laughed Barebone. "I am not afraid."

"One is not a Barebone—or a Bourbon—for nothing," observed Colville, in an aside to himself. "Gad! I wish I could say that I should not be afraid myself under similar circumstances. My heart was in my mouth, I can tell you, in that cabin when de Gemosac blurted it all out. It came suddenly at the end, and—well!—it rather hit one in the wind. And, as I say, one is not a Bourbon for nothing. You come into a heritage, eight hundred years old, of likes and dislikes, of genius and incapacity, of an astounding cleverness, and a preposterous foolishness without compare in the history of dynasties. But that doesn't matter nowadays. This is a progressive age, you know; even the Bourbons cannot hold back the advance of the times."

"I come into a heritage of friends and of enemies," said Barebone, gaily—"all ready made. That seems to me more important."

"Gad! you are right," exclaimed Colville. "I said you would do the moment I saw you step ashore at Farlingford. You have gone right to the heart of the question at the first bound. It is your friends and your enemies that will give you trouble."

"More especially my friends," suggested Loo, with a light laugh.

"Right again," answered Colville, glancing at him sideways beneath the brim of his hat. And there was a little pause before he spoke again.

"You have probably learnt how to deal with your enemies at sea," he said thoughtfully at length. "Have you ever noticed how an English ship comes into a foreign harbour and takes her berth at her moorings? There is nothing more characteristic of the nation. And one captain is like another. No doubt you have seen Clubbe do it a hundred times. He comes in, all sail set, and steers straight for the berth he has chosen. And there are always half a dozen men in half a dozen small boats who go out to meet him. They stand up and wave their arms, and point this way and that. They ask a hundred questions, and with their hands round their faces, shout their advice. And in answer to one and the other the Captain looks over the side and says, 'You be damned.' That will be the way to deal with some of your friends and all your enemies alike, Barebone, if you mean to get on in France. You will have to look over the side at the people in small boats who are shouting and say, 'You be damned.'"

They were at the gate of a house now, set down in a clearing amid the pine-trees.

"This is my cousin's house," said Dormer Colville. "It is to be your home for the present. And you need not scruple, as she will tell you, to consider it so. It is not a time to think of obligations, you understand, or to consider that you are running into any one's debt. You may remember that afterward, perhaps, but that is as may be. For the present there is no question of obligations. We are all in the same boat—all playing the same game."

And he laughed below his breath as he closed the gate with caution; for it was late and the house seemed to hold none but sleepers.

"As for my cousin herself," he continued, as they went toward the door, "you will find her easy to get on with—a clever woman, and a good-looking one. Du reste—it is not in that direction that your difficulties will lie. You will find it easy enough to get on with the women of the party, I fancy—from what I have observed."

And again he seemed to be amused.



CHAPTER XVI

THE GAMBLERS

In a sense, politics must always represent the game that is most attractive to the careful gambler. For one may play at it without having anything to lose. It is one of the few games within the reach of the adventurous, where no stake need be cast upon the table. The gambler who takes up a political career plays to win or not to win. He may jump up from the gutter and shout that he is the man of the moment, without offering any proof of his assertion beyond the loudness of a strident voice. And if no one listens to him he loses nothing but his breath.

And in France the man who shouts loudest is almost certain to have the largest following. In England the same does not yet hold good, but the day seems to be approaching when it will.

In France, ever since the great Revolution, men have leapt up from the gutter to grasp the reins of power. Some, indeed, have sprung from the gutter of a palace, which is no more wholesome, it would appear, than the drain of any street, or a ditch that carries off the refuse of a cheap Press.

There are certain rooms in the north wing of the Louvre, in Paris, rooms having windows facing across the Rue de Rivoli toward the Palais Royal, where men must have sat in the comfortable leather-covered chair of the High Official and laughed at the astounding simplicity of the French people. But he laughs best who laughs last, and the People will assuredly be amused in a few months, or a few years, at the very sudden and very humiliating discomfiture of a gentleman falling face-foremost into the street or hanging forlornly from a lamp-post at the corner of it. For some have quitted these comfortable chairs, in these quiet double-windowed rooms overlooking the Rue de Rivoli, for no better fate.

It was in the August of 1850 that a stout gentleman, seated in one of these comfortable chairs, succumbed so far to the warmth of the palace corridors as to fall asleep. He was not in the room of a high official, but in the waiting-room attached to it.

He knew, moreover, that the High Official himself was scarcely likely to dismiss a previous visitor or a present occupation any the earlier for being importuned; for he was aware of the official's antecedents, and knew that a Jack-in-office, who has shouted himself into office, is nearly always careful to be deaf to other voices than his own.

Moreover, Mr. John Turner was never pressed for time.

"Yes," he had been known to say, "I was in Paris in '48. Never missed a meal."

Whereas others, with much less at stake than this great banker, had omitted not only meals, but their night's rest—night after night—in those stirring times.

John Turner was still asleep when the door leading to the Minister's room was cautiously opened, showing an inner darkness such as prevails in an alcove between double doors. The door opened a little wider. No doubt the peeping eye had made sure that the occupant of the waiting-room was asleep. On the threshold stood a man of middle height, who carried himself with a certain grace and quiet dignity. He was pale almost to sallowness, a broad face with a kind mouth and melancholy eyes, without any light in them. The melancholy must have been expressed rather by the lines of the brows than by the eye itself, for this was without life or expression—the eye of a man who is either very short-sighted or is engaged in looking through that which he actually sees, to something he fancies he perceives beyond it.

His lips smiled, but the smile died beneath a neatly waxed moustache and reached no higher on the mask-like face. Then he disappeared in the outer darkness between the two doors, and the handle made no noise in turning.

In a few minutes an attendant, in a gay uniform, came in by the same door, without seeking to suppress the clatter of his boots on the oak floor.

"Hola! monsieur," he said, in a loud voice. And Mr. John Turner crossed his legs and leant farther back in the chair, preparatory to opening his eyes, which he did directly on the new-comer's face, without any of that vague flitting hither and thither of glance which usually denotes the sleeper surprised.

The eyes were of a clear blue, and Mr. Turner looked five years younger with them open than with them shut. But he was immensely stout.

"Well, my friend," he said, soothingly; for the Minister's attendant had a truculent ministerial manner. "Why so much noise?"

"The Minister will see you."

John Turner yawned and reached for his hat.

"The Minister is pressed for time."

"So was I," replied the Englishman, who spoke perfect French, "when I first sat down here, half an hour ago. But even haste will pass in time."

He rose, and followed the servant into the inner room, where he returned the bow of a little white-bearded gentleman seated at a huge desk.

"Well, sir," said this gentleman, with the abrupt manner which has come to be considered Napoleonic on the stage or in the political world to-day. "Your business?"

The servant had withdrawn, closing the door behind him with an emphasis of the self-accusatory sort.

"I am a banker," replied John Turner, looking with an obese deliberation toward one of the deep windows, where, half-concealed by the heavy curtain, a third person stood gazing down into the street.

The Minister smiled involuntarily, forgetting his dignity of a two-years' growth.

"Oh, you may speak before Monsieur," he said.

"But I am behind him," was the immediate reply.

The gentleman leaning against the window-breast did not accept this somewhat obvious invitation to show his face. He must have heard it, however, despite an absorption which was probably chronic; for he made a movement to follow with his glance the passage of some object of interest in the street below. And the movement seemed to supply John Turner with the information he desired.

"Yes, I am a banker," he said, more genially.

The Minister gave a short laugh.

"Monsieur," he said, "every one in Europe knows that. Proceed."

"And I only meddle in politics when I see the possibility of making an honest penny."

"Already made—that honest penny—if one may believe the gossip—of Europe," said the Minister. "So many pence that it is whispered that you do not know what to do with them."

"It is unfortunate," admitted Turner, "that one can only dine once a day."

The little gentleman in office had more than once invited his visitor to be seated, indicating by a gesture the chair placed ready for him. After a slow inspection of its legs, Mr. John Turner now seated himself. It would seem that he, at the same time, tacitly accepted the invitation to ignore the presence of a third person.

"Since you seem to know all about me," he said, "I will not waste any more of your time, or mine, by trying to make you believe that I am eminently respectable. The business that brought me here, however, is of a political nature. A plain man, like myself, only touches politics when he sees his gain clearly. There are others who enter that field from purer motives, I am told. I have not met them."

The Minister smiled on one side of his face, and all of it went white. He glanced uncomfortably at that third person, whom he had suggested ignoring.

"And yet," went on John Turner, very dense or greatly daring, "I have lived many years in France, Monsieur le Ministre."

The Minister frowned at him, and made a quick gesture of one hand toward the window.

"So long," pursued the Englishman, placidly, "as the trains start punctually, and there is not actually grape-shot in the streets, and one may count upon one's dinner at the hour, one form of government in this country seems to me to be as good as another, Monsieur le Ministre. A Bourbon Monarchy or an Orleans Monarchy, or a Republic, or—well, an Empire, Monsieur le Ministre."

"Mon Dieu! have you come here to tell me this?" cried the Minister, impatiently, glancing over his shoulder toward the window, and with one hand already stretched out toward the little bell standing on his desk.

"Yes," answered Turner, leaning forward to draw the bell out of reach. He nodded his head with a friendly smile, and his fat cheeks shook. "Yes, and other things as well. Some of those other matters are perhaps even more worthy of your earnest attention. It is worth your while to listen. More especially, as you are paid for it—by the hour."

He laughed inside himself, with a hollow sound, and placidly crossed his legs.

"Yes; I came to tell you, firstly, that the present form of government, and, er—any other form which may evolve from it—"

"Oh!—proceed, monsieur!" exclaimed the Minister, hastily, while the man in the recess of the window turned and looked over his shoulder at John Turner's profile with a smile, not unkind, on his sphinx-like face.

"—has the inestimable advantage of my passive approval. That is why I am here, in fact. I should be sorry to see it upset."

He broke off, and turned laboriously in his chair to look toward the window, as if the gaze of the expressionless eyes there had tickled the back of his neck like a fly. But by the time the heavy banker had got round, the curtain had fallen again in its original folds.

"—by a serious Royalist plot," concluded Turner, in his thick, deliberate way.

"So, assuredly, would any patriot or any true friend of France," said the Minister, in his best declamatory manner.

"Um—m. That is out of my depth," returned the Englishman, bluntly. "I paddle about in the shallow water at the edge and pick up what I can, you understand. I am too fat for a voyant bathing-costume, and the deep waters beyond, Monsieur le Ministre."

The Minister drummed impatiently on his desk with his five fingers, and looked at Turner sideways beneath his brows.

"Royalist plots are common enough," he said, tentatively, after a pause.

"Not a Royalist plot with money in it," was the retort. "I dare say an honest politician, like yourself, is aware that in France it is always safe to ignore the conspirator who has no money, and always dangerous to treat with contempt him who jingles a purse. There is only a certain amount of money in the world, Monsieur le Ministre, and we bankers usually know where it is. I do not mean the money that the world pours into its own stomach. That is always afloat—changing hands daily. I mean the Great Reserves. We watch those, you understand. And if one of the Great Reserves, or even one of the smaller reserves, moves, we wonder why it is being moved and we nearly always find out."

"One supposes," said the Minister, hazarding an opinion for the first time, and he gave it with a sidelong glance toward the window, "that it is passing from the hands of a financier possessing money into those of one who has none."

"Precisely. And if a financier possessing money is persuaded to part with it in such a quarter as you suggest, one may conclude that he has good reason to anticipate a substantial return for the loan. You, who are a brilliant collaborateur in the present government, should know that, if any one does, Monsieur le Ministre."

The Minister glanced toward the window, and then gave a good-natured and encouraging laugh, quite unexpectedly, just as if he had been told to do so by the silent man looking down into the street, who may, indeed, have had time to make a gesture.

"And," pursued the banker, "if a financier possessing money parts with it—or, to state the case more particularly, if a financier possessing no money, to my certain knowledge, suddenly raises it from nowhere definite, for the purposes of a Royalist conspiracy, the natural conclusion is that the Royalists have got hold of something good."

John Turner leant back in his chair and suppressed a yawn.

"This room is very warm," he said, producing a pocket-handkerchief. Which was tantamount to a refusal to say more.

The Minister twisted the end of his moustache in reflection. It was at this time the fashion in France to wear the moustache waxed. Indeed, men displayed thus their political bias to all whom it might concern.

"There remains nothing," said the official at length, with a gracious smile, "but to ask your terms."

For he who was afterward Napoleon the Third had introduced into French political and social life a plain-spoken cynicism which characterises both to this day.

"Easy," replied Turner. "You will find them easy. Firstly, I would ask that your stupid secret police keeps its fingers out; secondly, that leniency be assured to one person, a client of mine—the woman who supplies the money—who is under the influence—well, that influence which makes women do nobler and more foolish things, monsieur, than men are capable of."

He rose as he spoke, collected his hat and stick, and walked slowly to the door. With his hand on the handle, he paused.

"You can think about it," he said, "and let me know at your leisure. By the way, there is one more point, Monsieur le Ministre. I would ask you to let this matter remain a secret, known only to our two selves and—the Prince President."

And John Turner went out, without so much as a glance toward the window.



CHAPTER XVII

ON THE PONT ROYAL

It would appear that John Turner had business south of the Seine, though his clients were few in the Faubourg St. Germain. For this placid British banker was known to be a good hater. His father before him, it was said, had had dealings with the Bourbons, while many a great family of the Emigration would have lost more than the esteem of their fellows in their panic-stricken flight, had it not been that one cool-headed and calm man of business stayed at his post through the topsy-turvy days of the Terror, and did his duty by the clients whom he despised.

On quitting the Louvre, by the door facing the Palais Royal, Turner moved to the left. To say that he walked would be to overstate the action of his little stout legs, which took so short a stride that his progress suggested wheels and some one pushing behind. He turned to the left again, and ambled under the great arch, to take the path passing behind the Tuileries.

His stoutness was, in a sense, a safeguard in streets where the travelling Englishman, easily recognised, has not always found a welcome. His clothes and his walk were studiously French. Indeed, no one, passing by with a casual glance, would have turned to look a second time at a figure so typical of the Paris streets.

Mr. Turner quitted the enclosure of the Tuileries gardens and crossed the quay toward the Pont Royal. But he stopped short under the trees by the river wall, with a low whistle of surprise. Crossing the bridge, toward him, and carrying a carpet-bag of early Victorian design, was Mr. Septimus Marvin, rector of Farlingford, in Suffolk.

After a moment's thought, John Turner went toward the bridge, and stationed himself on the pavement at the corner. The pavement is narrow, and Turner was wide. In order to pass him, Septimus Marvin would need to step into the road. This he did, without resentment; with, indeed, a courtly and vague inclination of the head toward the human obstruction.

"Look here, Sep," said Turner, "you are not going to pass an old schoolfellow like that."

Septimus Marvin lurched onward one or two steps, with long loose strides. Then he clutched his carpet-bag with both hands and looked back at his interlocutor, with the scared eyes of a detected criminal. This gave place to the habitual gentle smile when, at last, the recognition was complete.

"What have you got there?" asked Turner, pointing with his stick at the carpet-bag. "A kitten?"

"No—no," replied Marvin, looking this way and that, to make sure that none could overhear.

"A Nanteuil—engraved from his own drawing, Jack—a real Nanteuil. I have just been to a man I know—the print-shop opposite the statue on the Quai Voltaire—to have my own opinion verified. I was sure of it. He says that I am undoubtedly right. It is a genuine Nanteuil—a proof before letters."

"Ah! And you have just picked it up cheap? Picked it up, eh?"

"No, no, quite the contrary," Marvin replied, in a confidential whisper.

"Stolen—dear, dear! I am sorry to hear that, Septimus."

And Septimus Marvin broke into the jerky, spasmodic laugh of one who has not laughed for long—perhaps for years.

"Ah, Jack," he said; "you are still up to a joke."

"Well, I should hope so. We are quite close to my club. Come, and have luncheon, and tell me all about it."

So the Social and Sporting Club, renowned at that day for its matchless cuisine and for nothing else of good repute at all, entertained an angel unawares, and was much amused at Septimus Marvin's appearance, although the amusement was not apparent. The members, it would appear, were gentlemen of that good school of old France which, like many good things both French and English, is fast disappearing. And with all those faults, which we are so ready to perceive in any Frenchman, there is none on earth who will conceal from you so effectually the fact that in his heart he is vastly amused.

It was with some difficulty that Septimus was persuaded to consign his carpet-bag to the custody of the hall-porter.

"If it wasn't a Nanteuil," he explained in a whisper to his friend, "I should have no hesitation; for I am sure the man is honest and in every way to be relied upon. But a Nanteuil—ad vivum—Jack. There are none like him. It is priceless."

"You used not to be a miser," said Turner, panting on the stairs, when at last the bag was concealed in a safe place. "What matter what the value may be, so long as you like it?"

"Oh! but the value is of great importance," answered Septimus, rather sheepishly.

"Then you have changed a good deal since you and I were at Ipswich school together. There, sit down at this table. I suppose you are hungry. I hope you are. Try and think—there's a good fellow—and remember that they have the best cook in Paris here. Their morals ain't of the first water, but their cook is without match. Yes, you have changed a good deal, if you think of money."

Septimus Marvin had changed colour, at all events, in the last few minutes.

"I have to, Jack, I have to. That is the truth of it. I have come to Paris to sell that Nanteuil. To realise, I suppose you would call it in the financial world. Pro aris et focis, old friend. I want money for the altar and the hearth. It has come to that. I cannot ask them in Farlingford for more money, for I know they have none. And the church is falling about our ears. The house wants painting. It is going the way of the church, indeed."

"Ah!" said Turner, glancing at him over the bill of fare. "So you have to sell an engraving. It goes to the heart, I suppose?"

Marvin laughed and rubbed his spare hands together, with an assumption of cheerfulness in which some one less stout and well-to-do than his companion might have perceived that dim minor note of pathos, which always rings somewhere in a forced laugh.

"One has to face it," he replied. "Ne cedas malis, you know. I suddenly found it was necessary. It was forced upon me, in fact. I found that my niece was secretly helping to make both ends meet. A generous action, made doubly generous by the manner in which it was performed."

"Miriam?" put in John Turner, who appeared to be absorbed in the all-important document before him.

"Yes, Miriam. Do you know her? Ah! I forgot. You are her guardian and trustee. I sometimes think my memory is failing. I found her out quite by accident. It must have been going on for quite a long time. Heaven will reward her, Turner! One cannot doubt it."

He absent-mindedly seized two pieces of bread from the basket offered to him by a waiter, and began to eat as if famished.

"Steady, man, steady," exclaimed Turner, leaning forward with a horror-stricken face to restrain him. "Don't spoil a grand appetite on bread. Gad! I wish I could fall on my food like that. You seem to be starving."

"I think I forgot to have any breakfast," said Marvin, apologetically.

"I dare say you did!" was the angry retort. "You always were a bit of an ass, you know, Sep. But I have ordered a tiptop luncheon, and I'll trouble you not to wolf like that."

"Well—well, I'm sorry," said the other, who, even in the far-off days at Ipswich school, had always been in the clouds, while John Turner moved essentially on the earth.

"And do not sell that Nanteuil to the first bidder," went on Turner, with a glance, of which the keenness was entirely disarmed by the good-natured roundness of his huge cheeks. "I know a man who will buy it—at a good price, too. Where did you get it?"

"Ah! that is a long story," replied Marvin, looking dreamily out of the window. "I bought it, years ago, at Farlingford. But it is a long story."

"Then tell it, slowly. While I eat this sole a la Normande. I see you've nearly finished yours, and I have scarcely begun."

It was a vague and disjointed enough story, as related by Septimus Marvin. And it was the story of Loo Barebone's father. As it progressed John Turner grew redder and redder in the face, while he drank glass after glass of Burgundy.

"A queer story," he ejaculated, breathlessly. "Go on. And you bought this engraving from the man himself, before he died? Did he tell you where he got it? It is the portrait of a woman, you say."

"Portrait of a woman—yes, yes. But he did not know who she was. And I do not know whether I gave him enough for it. Do you think I did, Jack?"

"I do not know how much you gave him, but I have no doubt that it was too much. Where did he get it?"

"He thinks it was brought from France by his mother, or the woman who was supposed in Farlingford to be his mother—together with other papers, which he burnt, I believe."

"And then he died?"

"Yes—yes. He died—but he left a son."

"The devil he did! Why did you not mention that before? Where is the son? Tell me all about him, while I see how they've served this langue fourree, which should be eaten slowly; though it is too late to remind you of that now. Go on. Tell me all about the son."

And before the story of Loo Barebone was half told, John Turner laid aside his knife and fork and turned his attention to the dissection of this ill-told tale. As the story neared its end, he glanced round the room, to make sure that none was listening to their conversation.

"Dormer Colville," he repeated. "Does he come into it?"

"He came to Farlingford with the Marquis de Gemosac, out of pure good-nature—because the Marquis could speak but little English. He is a charming man. So unselfish and disinterested."

"Who? The Marquis?"

"No; Dormer Colville."

"Oh yes!" said John Turner, returning to the cold tongue. "Yes; a charming fellow."

And he glanced again at his friend, with a queer smile. When luncheon was finished, Turner led the way to a small smoking-room, where they would be alone, and sent a messenger to fetch Septimus Marvin's bag from downstairs.

"We will have a look at your precious engraving," he said, "while we smoke a cigar. It is, I suppose, a relic of the Great Monarchy, and I may tell you that there is rather a small demand just now for relics of that period. It would be wiser not to take it into the open market. I think my client would give you as good a price as any; and I suppose you want to get as much as you can for it now that you have made up your mind to the sacrifice?"

Marvin suppressed a sigh, and rubbed his hands together with that forced jocularity which had made his companion turn grave once before.

"Oh, I mean to drive a hard bargain, I can tell you!" was the reply, with an assumption of worldly wisdom on a countenance little calculated to wear that expression naturally.

"What did your friend in the print-shop on the Quai Voltaire mention as a probable price?" asked Turner, carelessly.

"Well, he said he might be able to sell it for me at four thousand francs. I would not hear of his running any risk in the matter, however. Such a good fellow, he is. So honest."

"Yes, he is likely to be that," said Turner, with his broad smile. He was a little sleepy after a heavy luncheon, and sipped his coffee with a feeling of charity toward his fellow-men. "You would find lots of honest men in the Quai Voltaire, Sep. I will tell you what I will do. Give me the print, and I will do my best for you. Would ten thousand francs help you out of your difficulties?"

"I do not remember saying that I was in difficulties," objected the Reverend Septimus, with heightened colour.

"Don't you? Memory is bad, is it not? Would ten thousand francs paint the rectory, then?"

"It would ease my mind and sweeten my sleep at night to have half that sum, my friend. With two hundred pounds I could face the world aequo animo."

"I will see what I can do. This is the print, is it? I don't know much about such things myself, but I should put the price down at ten thousand francs."

"But the man in the Quai Voltaire?"

"Precisely. I know little about prints, but a lot about the Quai Voltaire. Who is the lady? I presume it is a portrait?"

"It is a portrait, but I cannot identify the original. To an expert of that period it should not be impossible, however." Septimus Marvin was all awake now, with flushed cheeks and eyes brightened by enthusiasm. "Do you know why? Because her hair is dressed in a peculiar way—poufs de sentiment, these curls are called. They were only worn for a brief period. In those days the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau had a certain vogue among the idle classes. The women showed their sentiments in the dressing of their hair. Very curious—very curious. And here, in the hair, half-concealed, is an imitation dove's nest."

"The deuce there is!" ejaculated Turner, pulling at his cigar.

"A fashion which ruled for a still briefer period."

"I should hope so. Well, roll the thing up, and I will do my best for you. I'm less likely to be taken in than you are, perhaps. If I sell it, I will send you a cheque this evening. It is a beautiful face."

"Yes," agreed Septimus Marvin, with, a sharp sigh. "It is a beautiful face."

And he slowly rolled up his most treasured possession, which John Turner tucked under his arm. On the Pont Royal they parted company.

"By the way," said John Turner, after they had shaken hands, "You never told me what sort of a man this young fellow is—this Loo Barebone?"

"The dearest fellow in the world," answered Marvin, with eyes aglow behind his spectacles. "To me he has been as a son—an elder brother, as it were, to little Sep. I was already an elderly man, you know, when Sep was born. Too old, perhaps. Who knows? Heaven's way is not always marked very clearly."

He nodded vaguely and went away a few paces. Then he remembered something and came back.

"I don't know if I ought to speak of such a thing. But I quite hoped, at one time, that Miriam might one day recognise his goodness of heart."

"What?" interrupted Turner. "The mate of a coasting schooner!"

"He is more than that, my friend," answered Septimus Marvin, nodding his head slowly, so that the sun flashed on his spectacles in such a manner as to make Turner blink. Then he turned away again and crossed the bridge, leaving the English banker at the corner of it, still blinking.



CHAPTER XVIII

THE CITY THAT SOON FORGETS

There are in humble life some families which settle their domestic differences on the doorstep, while the neighbours, gathered hastily by the commotion, tiptoe behind each other to watch the fun. In the European congerie France represents this loud-voiced household, and Paris—Paris, the city that soon forgets—is the doorstep whereon they wrangle.

The bones of contention may be pitched far and wide by the chances and changes of exile, but the contending dogs bark and yap in Paris. At this time there lived, sometimes in Italy, sometimes at Frohsdorf, a jovial young gentleman, fond of sport and society, cultivating the tastes and enjoying the easy existence of a country-gentleman of princely rank—the Comte de Chambord. Son of that Duchesse de Berri who tried to play a great part and failed, he was married to an Italian princess and had no children. He was, therefore, the last of the Bourbons, and passed in Europe as such. But he did not care. Perhaps his was the philosophy of the indolent which saith that some one must be last and why not I?

Nevertheless, there ran in his veins some energetic blood. On his father's side he was descended from sixty-six kings of France. From his mother he inherited a relationship to many makers of history. For the Duchesse de Berri's grandmother was the sister of Marie Antoinette. Her mother was aunt to that Empress of the French, Marie Louise, who was a notable exception to the rule that "Bon sang ne peut mentir." Her father was a king of Sicily and Naples. She was a Bourbon married to a Bourbon. When she was nineteen she gave birth to a daughter, who died next day. In a year she had a son who died in twenty hours. Two years later her husband died in her arms, assassinated, in a back room of the Opera House in Paris.

Seven months after her husband's death she gave birth to the Comte de Chambord, the last of the old Bourbons. She was active, energetic and of boundless courage. She made a famous journey through La Vendee on horseback to rally the Royalists. She urged her father-in-law, Charles X, to resist the revolution. She was the best Royalist of them all. And her son was the Comte de Chambord, who could have been a king if he had not been a philosopher, or a coward.

He was waiting till France called him with one voice. As if France had ever called for anything with one voice!

Amid the babel there rang out not a few voices for the younger branch of the Royal line—the Orleans. Louis Philippe—king for eighteen years—was still alive, living in exile at Claremont. Two years earlier, in the rush of the revolution of 1848, he had effected his escape to Newhaven. The Orleans always seek a refuge in England, and always turn and abuse that country when they can go elsewhere in safety. And England is not one penny the worse for their abuse, and no man or country was ever yet one penny the better for their friendship.

Louis Philippe had been called to the throne by the people of France. His reign of eighteen years was marked by one great deed. He threw open the Palace of Versailles—which was not his—to the public. And then the people who called him in, hooted him out. His life had been attempted many times. All the other kings hated him and refused to let their daughters marry his sons. He and his sons were waiting at Claremont while the talkers in Paris talked their loudest.

There was a third bone of contention—the Imperial line. At this time the champions of this morsel were at the summit; for a Bonaparte was riding on the top of the revolutionary scrimmage.

By the death of the great Napoleon's only child, the second son of his third brother became the recognised claimant to the Imperial crown.

For France has long ceased to look to the eldest son as the rightful heir. There is, in fact, a curse on the first-born of France. Napoleon's son, the King of Rome, died in exile, an Austrian. The Duc de Bordeaux, born eight years after him, never wore the crown, and died in exile, childless. The Comte de Paris, born also at the Tuileries, was exiled when he was ten years old, and died in England. All these, of one generation. And of the next, the Prince Imperial, hurried out of France in 1870, perished on the Veldt. The King of Rome lies in his tomb at Vienna, the Duc de Bordeaux at Goeritz, the Comte de Paris at Weybridge, the Prince Imperial at Farnborough. These are the heirs of France, born in the palace of the Tuileries. How are they cast upon the waters of the world! And where the palace of the Tuileries once stood the pigeons now call to each other beneath the trees, while, near at hand, lolls on the public seat he whom France has always with her, the vaurien—the worth-nothing.

So passes the glory of the world. It is not a good thing to be born in a palace, nor to live in one.

It was in the Rue Lafayette that John Turner had his office, and when he emerged from it into that long street on the evening of the 25th of August, 1850, he ran against, or he was rather run against by, the newsboy who shrieked as he pattered along in lamentable boots and waved a sheet in the face of the passer: "The King is dead! The King is dead!"

And Paris—the city that soon forgets—smiled and asked what King?

Louis Philippe was dead in England, at the age of seventy-seven, the bad son of a bad father, another of those adventurers whose happy hunting-ground always has been, always will be, France.

John Turner, like many who are slow in movement, was quick in thought. He perceived at once that the death of Louis Philippe left the field open to the next adventurer; for he left behind him no son of his own mettle.

Turner went back to his office, where the pen with which he had signed a cheque for four hundred pounds, payable to the Reverend Septimus Marvin, was still wet; where, at the bottom of the largest safe, the portrait of an unknown lady of the period of Louis XVI lay concealed. He wrote out a telegram to Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, addressed to her at her villa near Royan, and then proceeded to his dinner with the grave face of the careful critic.

The next morning he received the answer, at his breakfast-table, in the apartment he had long occupied in the Avenue d'Antin. But he did not open the envelope. He had telegraphed to Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, asking if it would be convenient for her to put him up for a few days. And he suspected that it would not.

"When I am gone," he said to his well-trained servant, "put that into an envelope and send it after me to the Villa Cordouan, Royan. Pack my portmanteau for a week."

Thus John Turner set out southward to join a party of those Royalists whom his father before him had learnt to despise. And in a manner he was pre-armed; for he knew that he would not be welcome. It was in those days a long journey, for the railway was laid no farther than Tours, from whence the traveller must needs post to La Rochelle, and there take a boat to Royan—that shallow harbour at the mouth of the Gironde.

"Must have a change—of cooking," he explained to Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence. "Doctor says I am getting too stout."

He shook her deliberately by the hand without appearing to notice her blank looks.

"So I came south and shall finish up at Biarritz, which they say is going to be fashionable. I hope it is not inconvenient for you to give me a bed—a solid one—for a night or two."

"Oh no!" answered Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, who had charming manners, and was one of those fortunate persons who are never at a loss. "Did you not receive my telegram?"

"Telling me you were counting the hours till my arrival?"

"Well," admitted Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, wisely reflecting that he would ultimately see the telegram, "hardly so fervent as that—"

"Good Lord!" interrupted Turner, looking behind her toward the veranda, which was cool and shady, where two men were seated near a table bearing coffee-cups. "Who is that?"

"Which?" asked Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, without turning to follow the direction of his glance. "Oh! one is Dormer Colville, I see that. But the other—gad!"

"Why do you say gad?" asked the lady, with surprise.

"Where did he get that face from?" was the reply.

Turner took off his hat and mopped his brow; for it was very hot and the August sun was setting over a copper sea.

"Where we all get our faces from, I suppose!" answered Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, with her easy laugh. She was always mistress of the situation. "The heavenly warehouse, one supposes. His name is Barebone. He is a friend of Dormer's."

"Any friend of Dormer Colville's commands my interest."

Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence glanced quickly at her companion beneath the shade of her lace-trimmed parasol.

"What do you mean by that?" she asked, in a voice suddenly hard and resentful.

"That he chooses his friends well," returned the banker, with his guileless smile. His face was bovine, and in the heat of summer apt to be shiny. No one would attribute an inner meaning to a stout person thus outwardly brilliant. Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence appeared to be mollified, and turned toward the house with a gesture inviting him to walk with her.

"I will be frank with you," she said. "I telegraphed to tell you that the Villa Cordouan is for the moment unfortunately filled with guests."

"What matter? I will go to the hotel. In fact, I told the driver of my carriage to wait for further orders. I half feared that at this time of year, you know, house would be full. I'll just shake hands with Colville and then be off. You will let me come in after dinner, perhaps. You and I must have a talk about money, you will remember."

There was no time to answer; for Dormer Colville, perceiving their approach, was already hurrying down the steps of the veranda to meet them. He laughed as he came, for John Turner's bulk made him a laughing matter in the eyes of most men, and his good humour seemed to invite them to frank amusement.

The greeting was, therefore, jovial enough on both sides, and after being introduced to Loo Barebone, Mr. Turner took his leave without farther defining his intentions for the evening.

"I do not think it matters much," Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence said to her two guests, when he had left. "And he may not come, after all."

Her self-confidence sufficiently convinced Loo, who was always ready to leave something to chance. But Colville shook his head.

It thus came about that sundry persons of title and importance who had been invited to come to the Villa Cordouan after dinner for a little music found the English banker complacently installed in the largest chair, with a shirt-front evading the constraint of an abnormal waistcoat, and a sleepy chin drooping surreptitiously toward it.

"He is my banker from Paris," whispered Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence to one and another. "He knows nothing, and so far as I am aware, is no politician—merely a banker, you understand. Leave him alone and he will go to sleep."

During the three weeks which Loo Barebone had spent very pleasantly at the Villa Cordouan, Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence had provided music and light refreshment for her friends on several occasions. And each evening the drawing-room, which was not a small one, had been filled to overflowing. Friends brought their friends and introduced them to the hostess, who in turn presented them to Barebone. Some came from a distance, driving from Saintes or La Rochelle or Pons. Others had taken houses for the bathing-season at Royan itself.

"He never makes a mistake," said the hostess to Dormer Colville, behind her fan, a hundred times, following with her shrewd eyes the gay and easy movements of Loo, who seemed to be taught by some instinct to suit his manner to his interlocutor.

To-night there was more music and less conversation.

"Play him to sleep," Dormer Colville had said to his cousin. And at length Turner succumbed to the soft effect of a sonata. He even snored in the shade of a palm, and the gaiety of the proceedings in no way suffered.

It was only Colville who seemed uneasy and always urged any who were talking earnestly to keep out of earshot of the sleeping Englishman. Once or twice he took Barebone by the arm and led him to the other end of the room, for he was always the centre of the liveliest group and led the laughter there.

"Oh! but he is charming, my dear," more than one guest whispered to Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, as they took their departure.

"He will do—he will do," the men said with a new light of hope in their grave faces.

Nearly all had gone when John Turner at length woke up. Indeed, Colville threw a book upon the floor to disturb his placid sleep.

"I will come round to-morrow," he said, bidding his hostess good night. "I have some papers for you to sign since you are determined to sell your rentes and leave the money idle at your bank."

"Yes. I am quite determined," she answered, gaily, for she was before her time inasmuch as she was what is known in these days of degenerate speech as cock-sure.

And when John Turner, carrying a bundle of papers, presented himself at the Villa Cordouan next morning he found Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence sitting alone in the veranda.

"Dormer and his friend have left me to my own devices. They have gone away," she mentioned, casually, in the course of conversation.

"Suddenly?"

"Oh no," she answered, carelessly, and wrote her name in a clear firm hand on the document before her. And John Turner looked dense.



CHAPTER XIX

IN THE BREACH

The Marquis de Gemosac was sitting at the open window of the little drawing-room in the only habitable part of the chateau. From his position he looked across the courtyard toward the garden where stiff cypress-trees stood sentry among the mignonette and the roses, now in the full glory of their autumn bloom.

Beyond the garden, the rough outline of the walls cut a straight line across the distant plains, which melted away into the haze of the marsh-lands by the banks of the Gironde far to the westward.

The Marquis had dined. They dined early in those days in France, and coffee was still served after the evening meal.

The sun was declining toward the sea in a clear copper-coloured sky, but a fresh breeze was blowing in from the estuary to temper the heat of the later rays.

The Marquis was beating time with one finger, and within the room, to an impromptu accompaniment invented by Juliette, Barebone was singing:

C'est le Hasard, Qui, tot ou tard, Ici-bas nous seconde; Car, D'un bout du monde A l'autre bout, Le Hasard seul fait tout.

He broke off with a laugh in which Juliette's low voice joined.

"That is splendid, mademoiselle," he cried, and the Marquis clapped his thin hands together.

Un tel qu'on vantait Par hasard etait D'origine assez mince; Par hasard il plut, Par hasard il fut Baron, ministre et prince: C'est le Hasard, Qui, tot ou tard, Ici bas nous seconde; Car, D'un bout du monde A l'autre bout, Le Hasard seul fait tout.

"There—that is all I know. It is the only song I sing."

"But there are other verses," said Juliette, resting her hands on the keys of the wheezy spinet which must have been a hundred years old. "What are they about?"

"I do not know, mademoiselle," he answered, looking down at her. "I think it is a love-song."

She had pinned some mignonette, strong scented as autumn mignonette is, in the front of her muslin dress, and the heavy heads had dragged the stems to one side. She put the flowers in order, slowly, and then bent her head to enjoy the scent of them.

"It scarcely sounds like one," she said, in a low and inquiring voice. The Marquis was a little deaf. "Is it all chance then?"

"Oh yes," he answered, and as he spoke without lowering his voice she played softly on the old piano the simple melody of his song. "It is all chance, mademoiselle. Did they not teach you that at the school at Saintes?"

But she was not in a humour to join in his ready laughter. The room was rosy with the glow of the setting sun, she breathed the scent of the mignonette at every breath, the air which she had picked out on the spinet in unison with his clear and sympathetic voice had those minor tones and slow slurring from note to note which are characteristic of the gay and tearful songs of southern France and all Spain. None of which things are conducive to gaiety when one is young.

She glanced at him with one quick turn of the head and made no answer. But she played the air over again—the girls sing it to this day over their household work at Farlingford to other words—with her foot on the soft pedal. The Marquis hummed it between his teeth at the other end of the room.

"This room is hot," she exclaimed, suddenly, and rose from her seat without troubling to finish the melody. "And that window will not open, mademoiselle; for I have tried it," added Barebone, watching her impatient movements.

"Then I am going into the garden," she said, with a sharp sigh and a wilful toss of the head. It was not his fault that the setting sun, against which, as many have discovered, men shut their doors, should happen to be burning hot or that the window would not open. But Juliette seemed to blame him for it or for something else, perhaps. One never knows. Barebone did not follow her at once, but stood by the window talking to the Marquis, who was in a reminiscent humour. The old man interrupted his own narrative, however.

"There," he cried, "is Juliette on that wall overhanging the river. It is where the English effected a breach long ago, my friend—you need not smile, for you are no Englishman—and the chateau has only been taken twice through all the centuries of fighting. There! She ventures still farther. I have told her a hundred times that the wall is unsafe."

"Shall I go and warn her the hundred-and-first time?" asked Loo, willing enough.

"Yes, my friend, do. And speak to her severely. She is only a child, remember."

"Yes—I will remember that."

Juliette did not seem to hear his approach across the turf where the goats fed now, but stood with her back toward him, a few feet below him, actually in that breach effected long ago by those pestilential English. They must have prized out the great stones with crowbars and torn them down with their bare hands.

Juliette was looking over the vineyards toward the river, which gleamed across the horizon. She was humming to herself the last lines of the song:

D'un bout du monde A l'autre bout, Le Hasard seul fait tout.

She turned with a pretty swing of her skirts to gather them in her hand.

"You must go no farther, mademoiselle," said Loo.

She stopped, half bending to take her skirt, but did not look back. Then she took two steps downward from stone to stone. The blocks were half embedded in the turf and looked ready to fall under the smallest additional weight.

"It is not I who say so, but your father who sent me," explained the admonisher from above.

"Since it is all chance—" she said, looking downward.

She turned suddenly and looked up at him with that impatience which gives way in later life to a philosophy infinitely to be dreaded when it comes; for its real name is Indifference.

Her movements were spasmodic and quick as if something angered her, she knew not what; as if she wanted something, she knew not what.

"I suppose," she said, "that it was chance that saved our lives that night two months ago, out there."

And she stood with one hand stretched out behind her pointing toward the estuary, which was quiet enough now, looking up at him with that strange anger or new disquietude—it was hard to tell which—glowing in her eyes. The wind fluttered her hair, which was tied low down with a ribbon in the mode named "a la diable" by some French wit with a sore heart in an old man's breast. For none other could have so aptly described it.

"All chance, mademoiselle," he answered, looking over her head toward the river.

"And it would have been the same had it been only Marie or Marie and Jean in the boat with you?"

"The boat would have been as solid and the ropes as strong."

"And you?" asked the girl, with a glance from her persistent eyes.

"Oh no!" he answered, with a laugh. "I should not have been the same. But you must not continue to stand there, mademoiselle; the wall is unsafe."

She shrugged her shoulders and stood with half-averted face, looking down at the vineyards which stretched away to the dunes by the river. Her cheeks were oddly flushed.

"Your father sent me to say so," continued Loo, "and if he sees that you take no heed he will come himself to learn why."

Juliette gave a curt laugh and climbed the declivity toward him. The argument was, it seemed, a sound one. When she reached his level he made a step or two along the path that ran round the enceinte—not toward the house, however—but away from it. She accepted the tacit suggestion, not tacitly, however.

"Shall we not go and tell papa we have returned without mishap?" she amended, with a light laugh.

"No, mademoiselle," he answered. It was his turn to be grave now and she glanced at him with a gleam of satisfaction beneath her lids. She was not content with that, however, but wished to make him angry. So she laughed again and they would have quarrelled if he had not kept his lips firmly closed and looked straight in front of him.

They passed between the unfinished ruin known as the Italian house and the rampart. The Italian house screened them from the windows of that portion of the ancient stabling which the Marquis had made habitable when he bought back the chateau of Gemosac from the descendant of an adventurous republican to whom the estate had been awarded in the days of the Terror. A walk of lime-trees bordered that part of the garden which lies to the west of the Italian house, and no other part was visible from where Juliette paused to watch the sun sink below the distant horizon. Loo was walking a few paces behind her, and when she stopped he stopped also. She sat down on the low wall, but he remained standing.

Her profile, clear-cut and delicate with its short chin and beautifully curved lips, its slightly aquiline nose and crisp hair rising in a bold curve from her forehead, was outlined against the sky. He could see the gleam of the western light in her eyes, which were half averted. While she watched the sunset, he watched her with a puzzled expression about his lips.

He remembered perhaps the Marquis's last words, that Juliette was only a child. He knew that she could in all human calculation know nothing of the world; that at least she could have learned nothing of it in the convent where she had been educated. So, if she knew anything, she must have known it before she went there, which was impossible. She knew nothing, therefore, and yet she was not a child. As a matter of fact, she was the most beautiful woman Loo Barebone had ever seen. He was thinking that as she sat on the low wall, swinging one slipper half falling from her foot, watching the sunset, while he watched her and noted the anger slowly dying from her eyes as the light faded from the sky. That strange anger went down, it would appear, with the sun. After the long silence—when the low bars of red cloud lying across the western sky were fading from pink to grey—she spoke at last in a voice which he had never heard before, gentle and confidential.

"When are you going away?" she asked.

"To-night."

And he knew that the very hour of his departure was known to her already.

"And when will you come back?"

"As soon as I can," he answered, half-involuntarily. There was a turn of the head half toward him, something expectant in the tilt at the corner of her parted lips, which made it practically impossible to make any other answer.

"Why?" she asked, in little more than a whisper—then she broke into a gay laugh and leapt off the wall. She walked quickly past him.

"Why?" she repeated over her shoulder as she passed him. And he was too quick for her, for he caught her hand and touched it with his lips before she jerked it away from him.

"Because you are here," he answered, with a laugh. But she was grave again and looked at him with a queer searching glance before she turned away and left him standing in the half-light—thinking of Miriam Liston.



CHAPTER XX

"NINETEEN"

As Juliette returned to the Gate House she encountered her father, walking arm-in-arm with Dormer Colville. The presence of the Englishman within the enceinte of the chateau was probably no surprise to her, for she must have heard the clang of the bell just within the gate, which could not be opened from outside; by which alone access was gained to any part of the chateau.

Colville was in riding costume. It was, indeed, his habitual dress when living in France, for he made no concealment of his partnership in a well-known business house in Bordeaux.

"I am a sleeping partner," he would say, with that easy flow of egotistic confidence which is the surest way of learning somewhat of your neighbour's private affairs. "I am a sleeping partner at all times except the vintage, when I awake and ride round among the growers, to test their growth."

It was too early yet for these journeys, for the grapes were hardly ripe. But any one who wished to move from place to place must needs do so in the saddle in a country where land is so valuable that the width of a road is grudged, and bridle-ways are deemed good enough for the passage of the long and narrow carts that carry wine.

Ever since their somewhat precipitate departure from the Villa Cordouan at Royan, Dormer Colville and Barebone had been in company. They had stayed together, in one friend's house or another. Sometimes they enjoyed the hospitality of a chateau, and at others put up with the scanty accommodation of a priest's house or the apartment of a retired military officer, in one of those little towns of provincial France at which the cheap journalists of Paris are pleased to sneer without ceasing.

They avoided the large towns with extraordinary care.

"Why should we go to towns," asked Colville, jovially, "when we have business in the country and the sun is still high in the sky?"

"Yes," he would reply to the questions of an indiscreet fellow-traveller, at table or on the road. "Yes; I am a buyer of wine. We are buyers of wine. We are travelling from place to place to watch the growth. For the wine is hidden in the grape, and the grape is ripening."

And, as often as not, the chance acquaintance of an inn dejeuner would catch the phrase and repeat it thoughtfully.

"Ah! is that so?" he would ask, with a sudden glance at Dormer Colville's companion, who had hitherto passed unobserved as the silent subordinate of a large buyer; learning his trade, no doubt. "The grape is ripening. Good!"

And as sure as he seemed to be struck with this statement of a self-evident fact, he would, in the next few minutes, bring the numeral "nineteen"—tant bien que mal—into his conversation.

"With nineteen days of sun, the vintage will be upon us," he would say; or, "I have but nineteen kilometres more of road before me to-day."

Indeed, it frequently happened that the word came in very inappropriately, as if tugged heroically to the front by a clumsy conversationalist.

There is no hazard of life so certain to discover sympathy or antagonism as travel—a fact which points to the wisdom of beginning married life with a journey. The majority of people like to know the worst at once. To travel, however, with Dormer Colville was a liberal education in the virtues. No man could be less selfish or less easily fatigued; which are the two bases upon which rest all the stumbling-blocks of travel.

Up to a certain point, Barebone and Dormer Colville became fast friends during the month that elapsed between their departure from Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence's house and their arrival at the inn at Gemosac. The "White Horse," at Gemosac, was no better and no worse than any other "White Horse" in any other small town of France. It was, however, better than the principal inn of a town of the same size in any other habitable part of the globe.

There were many reasons why the Marquis de Gemosac had yielded to Colville's contention—that the time had not yet come for Loo Barebone to be his guest at the chateau.

"He is inclined to be indolent," Colville had whispered. "One recognises, in many traits of character, the source from whence his blood is drawn. He will not exert himself so long as there is some one else at hand who is prepared to take trouble. He must learn that it is necessary to act for himself. He needs rousing. Let him travel through France, and see for himself that of which he has as yet only learnt at second-hand. That will rouse him."

And the journey through the valleys of the Garonne and the Dordogne had been undertaken.

Another, greater journey, was now afoot, to end at no less a centre of political life than Paris. A start was to be made this evening, and Dormer Colville now came to report that all was ready and the horses at the gate.

"If there were scenes such as this for all of us to linger in, mademoiselle," he said, lifting his face to the western sky and inhaling the scent of the flowers growing knee-deep all around him, "men would accomplish little in their brief lifetime."

His eyes, dreamy and reflective, wandered over the scene and paused, just for a moment in passing, on Juliette's face. She continued her way, with no other answer than a smile.

"She grows, my dear Marquis—she grows every minute of the day and wakes up a new woman every morning," said Colville, in a confidential aside, and he went forward to meet Loo with his accustomed laugh of good-fellowship. He whom the world calls a good fellow is never a wise man.

Barebone walked toward the gate without joining in the talk of his companions. He was thoughtful and uneasy. He had come to say good-bye and nothing else. He was wondering if he had really meant what he had said.

"Come," interrupted Colville's smooth voice. "We must get into the saddle and begone. I was just telling Monsieur and Mademoiselle Juliette, that any man might be tempted to linger at Gemosac until the active years of a lifetime rolled by."

The Marquis made the needful reply; hoping that he might yet live to see Gemosac—and not only Gemosac, but a hundred chateaux like it—reawakened to their ancient glory, and thrown open to welcome the restorer of their fallen fortunes.

Colville looked from one to the other, and then, with his foot in the stirrup, turned to look at Juliette, who had followed them to the gate.

"And mademoiselle," he said; "will she wish us good luck, also? Alas! those times are gone when we could have asked for her ribbon to wear, and to fight for between ourselves when we are tired and cross at the end of a journey. Come, Barchone—into the saddle."

They waited, both looking at Juliette; for she had not spoken.

"I wish you good luck," she said, at length, patting the neck of Colville's horse, her face wearing a little mystic smile.

Thus they departed, at sunset, on a journey of which old men will still talk in certain parts of France. Here and there, in the Angoumois, in Guienne, in the Vendee, and in the western parts of Brittany, the student of forgotten history may find an old priest who will still persist in dividing France into the ancient provinces, and will tell how Hope rode through the Royalist country when he himself was busy at his first cure.

The journey lasted nearly two months, and before they passed north of the Loire at Nantes and quitted the wine country, the vintage was over.

"We must say that we are cider merchants, that is all," observed Dormer Colville, when they crossed the river, which has always been the great divider of France.

"He is sobering down. I believe he will become serious," wrote he to the Marquis de Gemosac. But he took care to leave Loo Barebone as free as possible.

"I am, in a way, a compulsory pilot," he explained, airily, to his companion. "The ship is yours, and you probably know more about the shoals than I do. You must have felt that a hundred times when you were at sea with that solemn old sailor, Captain Clubbe. And yet, before you could get into port, you found yourself forced to take the compulsory pilot on board and make him welcome with such grace as you could command, feeling all the while that he did not want to come and you could have done as well without him. So you must put up with my company as gracefully as you can, remembering that you can drop me as soon as you are in port."

And surely, none other could have occupied an uncomfortable position so gracefully.

Barebone found that he had not much to do. He soon accommodated himself to a position which required nothing more active than a ready ear and a gracious patience. For, day by day—almost hour by hour—it was his lot to listen to protestations of loyalty to a cause which smouldered none the less hotly because it was hidden from the sight of the Prince President's spies.

And, as Colville had predicted, Barebone sobered down. He would ride now, hour after hour, in silence, whereas at the beginning of the journey he had talked gaily enough, seeing a hundred humorous incidents in the passing events of the day; laughing at the recollection of an interview with some provincial notable who had fallen behind the times, or jesting readily enough with such as showed a turn for joking on the road.

But now the unreality of his singular change of fortune was vanishing. Every village priest who came after dark to take a glass of wine with them at their inn sent it farther into the past, every provincial noble greeting him on the step of his remote and quiet house added a note to the drumming reality which dominated his waking moments and disturbed his sleep at night.

Day by day they rode on, passing through two or three villages between such halts as were needed by the horses. At every hamlet, in the large villages, where they rested and had their food, at the remote little town where they passed a night, there was always some one expecting them, who came and talked of the weather and more or less skilfully brought in the numeral nineteen. "Nineteen! Nineteen!" It was a watchword all over France.

Long before, on the banks of the Dordogne, Loo had asked his companion why that word had been selected—what it meant.

"It means Louis XIX," replied Dormer Colville, gravely.

And now, as they rode through a country so rural, so thinly populated and remote that nothing like it may be found in these crowded islands, the number seemed to follow them; or, rather, to pass on before them and await their coming.

Often Colville would point silently with his whip to the numerals, scrawled on a gate-post or written across a wall. At this time France was mysteriously flooded with cheap portraits of the great Napoleon. It was before the days of pictorial advertisement, and young ladies who wished to make an advantageous marriage had no means of advertising the fact and themselves in supplements to illustrated papers. The walls of inns and shops and diligence offices were therefore barer than they are to-day. And from these bare walls stared out at this time the well-known face of the great Napoleon. It was an innovation, and as such readily enough accepted.

At every fair, at the great fete of St. Jean, at St. Jean d'Angely and a hundred other fetes of purely local notoriety, at least one hawker of cheap lithographs was to be found. And if the buyer haggled, he could get the portrait of the great Emperor for almost nothing.

"One cannot print it at such a cost," the seller assured his purchasers, which was no less than the truth.

The fairs were, and are to this day, the link between the remoter villages and the world; and the peasants carried home with them a picture, for the first time, to hang on their walls. Thus the Prince President fostered the Napoleonic legend.

Dormer Colville would walk up to these pictures, and, as often as not, would turn and look over his shoulder at Barebone, with a short laugh. For as often as not, the numerals were scrawled across the face in pencil.

But Barebone had ceased to laugh at the constant repetition now. Soon Colville ceased to point out the silent witness, for he perceived that Loo was looking for it himself, detecting its absence with a gleam of determination in his eyes or noting its recurrence with a sharp sigh, as of the consciousness of a great responsibility.

Thus the reality was gradually forced upon him that that into which he had entered half in jest was no jest at all; that he was moving forward on a road which seemed easy enough, but of which the end was not perceptible; neither was there any turning to one side or the other.

All men who have made a mark—whether it be a guiding or warning sign to those that follow—must at one moment of their career have perceived their road before them, thus. Each must have realised that once set out upon that easy path there is no turning aside and no turning back. And many have chosen to turn back while there was yet time, leaving the mark unmade. For most men are cowards and shun responsibility. Most men unconsciously steer their way by proverb or catchword; and all the wise saws of all the nations preach cowardice.

Barebone saw his road now, and Dormer Colville knew that he saw it.

When they crossed the Loire they passed the crisis, and Colville breathed again like one who had held his breath for long. Those colder, sterner men of Brittany, who, in later times, compared notes with the nobles of Guienne and the Vendee, seemed to talk of a different man; for they spoke of one who rarely laughed, and never turned aside from a chosen path which was in no wise bordered by flowers.



Chapter XXI

NO. 8 RUELLE ST. JACOB

Between the Rue de Lille and the Boulevard St. Germain, in the narrow streets which to this day have survived the sweeping influence of Baron Haussmann, once Prefect of the Seine, there are many houses which scarcely seem to have opened door or window since the great Revolution.

One of these, to be precise, is situated in the Ruelle St. Jacob, hardly wider than a lane—a short street with a blind end against high walls—into which any vehicle that enters must needs do so with the knowledge of having to back out again. For there is no room to turn. Which is an allegory. All the windows, in fact, that look forlornly at the blank walls or peep over the high gateways into the Ruelle St. Jacob are Royalist windows looking into a street which is blinded by a high wall and is too narrow to allow of turning.

Many of the windows would appear to have gathered dust since those days more than a hundred years ago when white faces peeped from them and trembling hands unbarred the sash to listen to the roar of voices in the Rue du Bac, in the open space by the church of St. Germain des Pres, in the Cite, all over Paris, where the people were making history.

To this house in the Ruelle St. Jacob, Dormer Colville and Loo Barebone made their way on foot, on their arrival in Paris at the termination of their long journey.

It was nearly dark, for Colville had arranged to approach the city and leave their horses at a stable at Meudon after dusk.

"It is foolish," he said, gaily, to his companion, "to flaunt a face like yours in Paris by daylight."

They had driven from Meudon in a hired carriage to the corner of the Champ de Mars, in those days still innocent of glass houses and exhibition buildings, for Paris was not yet the toy-shop of the world; and from the Champ de Mars they came on foot through the ill-paved, feebly lighted streets. In the Ruelle St. Jacob itself there was only one lamp, burning oil, swinging at the corner. The remainder of the lane depended for its illumination on the windows of two small shops retailing firewood and pickled gherkins and balls of string grey with age, as do all the shops in the narrow streets on the wrong side of the Seine.

Dormer Colville led the way, picking his steps from side to side of the gutter which meandered odoriferously down the middle of the street toward the river. He stopped in front of the great gateway and looked up at the arch of it, where the stone carving had been carefully obliterated by some enthusiastic citizen armed with a hatchet.

"Ichabod," he said, with a short laugh; and cautiously laid bold of the dangling bell-handle which had summoned the porter to open to a Queen in those gay days when Marie Antoinette light-heartedly pushed a falling monarchy down the incline.

The great gate was not opened in response, but a small side door, deep-sunken in the thickness of the wall. On either jamb of the door was affixed in the metal letters ordained by the municipality the number eight. Number Eight Ruelle St. Jacob had once been known to kings as the Hotel Gemosac.

The man who opened earned a lantern and held the door ajar with a grudging hand while he peered out. One could almost imagine that he had survived the downfall and the Restoration, and a couple of republics, behind the high walls.

The court-yard was paved with round cobble-stones no bigger than an apple, and, even by the flickering light of the lantern, it was perceptible that no weed had been allowed to grow between the stones or in the seams of the wide, low steps that led to an open door.

The house appeared to be dark and deserted.

"Yes, Monsieur le Marquis—Monsieur le Marquis is at home," muttered the man with a bronchial chuckle, and led the way across the yard. He wore a sort of livery, which must have been put away for years. A young man had been measured for the coat which now displayed three deep creases across a bent back.

"Attention—attention!" he said, in a warning voice, while he scraped a sulphur match in the hall. "There are holes in the carpets. It is easy to trip and fall."

He lighted the candle, and after having carefully shut and bolted the door, he led the way upstairs. At their approach, easily audible in the empty house by reason of the hollow creaking of the oak floor, a door was opened at the head of the stairs and a flood of light met the new-comers.

In the doorway, which was ten feet high, the little bent form of the Marquis de Gemosac stood waiting.

"Ah! ah!" he said, with that pleasant manner of his generation, which was refined and spirituelle and sometimes dramatic, and yet ever failed to touch aught but the surface of life. "Ah! ah! Safely accomplished—the great journey. Safely accomplished. You permit—"

And he embraced Barebone after the custom of his day. "From all sides," he said, when the door was closed, "I hear that you have done great things. From every quarter one hears your praise."

He held him at arm's length.

"Yes," he said. "Your face is graver and—more striking in resemblance than ever. So now you know—now you have seen."

"Yes," answered Barebone, gravely. "I have seen and I know."

The Marquis rubbed his white hands together and gave a little crackling laugh of delight as he drew forward a chair to the fire, which was of logs as long as a barrel. The room was a huge one, and it was lighted from end to end with lamps, as if for a reception or a ball. The air was damp and mouldly. There were patches of grey on the walls, which had once been painted with garlands of roses and Cupids and pastoral scenes by a noted artist of the Great Age.

The ceiling had fallen in places, and the woodwork of the carved furniture gave forth a subtle scent of dry rot.

But everything was in an exquisite taste which vulgarer generations have never yet succeeded in imitating. Nothing was concealed, but rather displayed with a half-cynical pride. All was moth-ridden, worm-eaten, fallen to decay—but it was of the Monarchy. Not half a dozen houses in Paris, where already the wealth, which has to-day culminated in a ridiculous luxury of outward show, was beginning to build new palaces, could show room after room furnished in the days of the Great Louis. The very air, faintly scented it would seem by some forgotten perfume, breathed of a bygone splendour. And the last of the de Gemosacs scorned to screen his poverty from the eyes of his equals, nor sought to hide from them a desolation which was only symbolic of that which crushed their hearts and bade them steal back from time to time like criminals to the capital.

"You see," he said to Colville and Barebone, "I have kept my promise, I have thrown open this old house once more for to-night's meeting. You will find that many friends have made the journey to Paris for the occasion—Madame de Chantonnay and Albert, Madame de Rathe and many from the Vendee and the West whom you have met on your journey. And to-night one may speak without fear, for none will be present who are not vouched for by the Almanac de Gotha. There are no Royalists pour rire or pour vivre to-night. You have but time to change your clothes and dine. Your luggage arrived yesterday. You will forgive the stupidity of old servants who have forgotten their business. Come, I will lead the way and show you your rooms."

He took a candle and did the honours of the deserted dust-ridden house in the manner of the high calling which had been his twenty years ago when Charles X was king. For some there lingers a certain pathos in the sight of a belated survival, while the majority of men and women are ready to smile at it instead. And yet the Monarchy lasted eight centuries and the Revolution eight years. Perhaps Fate may yet exact payment for the excesses of those eight years from a nation for which the watching world already prepares a secondary place in the councils of empire.